Let’s leave the networking aspect aside for a moment.
When a language is compiled, the source files go through a pipeline of parser -> preprocessor -> compiler -> assembler -> linker, to end up with an executable. With interpreted languages, the source code is instantly executed line by line by an interpreter software. With JIT languages, the program gets compiled and optimized into portable bytecode, which is run by the language’s runtime.
If I had to guess, web pages (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS) are most likely run by an interpreter that is a web browser, but isn’t that inefficient given that most of what people do on computers is browsing the web? What about browsers, what standard is there that specifies how each language should be run/rendered? What pipeline does a webpage go through to end up as a process in a computer?
HTML is, as the expanded name implies, a markup language.
It’s just a text document that, based on the markup around the sections of text, gets rendered according to the rules assigned to the markup tags. It’s quite similar to a Word doc.
Javascript is interpreted and JIT-compiled by the Javascript engine. Works similarly to other interpreted languages (Python, BASIC, VBScript, etc)
CSS…I’m less clear on but am guessing it’s somewhere between markup and interpreted.
Pipeline is HTML -> CSS -> Javascript. JS can then go back and alter the previous two.
Word docs are actually html under the hood. .docx is just an archive containing all the relevant files iirc
It’s true that docx (also other Office Open XML and OpenDocument file types) is a zip file containing the files that make up the document, but those files have little in common with HTML, they are their own XML schemas.